The increased presence of wireless-based communication systems has spurred substantial growth in the voice and data services available to customers. Wireless networks are now frequently installed in place of traditional wired networks in office as well as home environments, and in local as well as large area networks. Typically, these networks have a base station that is allocated a radio frequency (RF) spectrum which it divides into different channel frequencies that are then used to communicate with multiple remote (often mobile) communication devices. In a cellular system, the base station may be a cellular base station and the remote devices would then be mobile handset communicators, like cellular phones, walkie-talkies, personal data assistants, etc. In a local area network, the base station may be a wireless router, such as one compliant with one or more of the various IEEE 802.11 standards, and the remote devices may be a desktop or laptop computer, wireless printer, another wireless node, etc. In any event, over time as the number of remote devices increases, the allocated spectrum for each communication system has become increasingly more crowded and the available channel frequencies more scarce.
Whereas traditional network solutions relied upon a top down approach, where the available frequency spectrum bandwidth was first identified and then channelized, more recently some have proposed bottom up approaches such as cognitive radios that proactively mine for “holes” in an available spectrum. Cognitive radios are, generally speaking, wireless communication devices that have transmission and reception characteristics that can change based on a measure of the RF environment of the device. A cognitive radio may scan a large frequency spectrum to determine what frequency bands are not in use, and then set up communications to transmit over only those identified, unused frequency bands. In other applications, cognitive radio operation may be based on environmental data such as operational rules for the network, user behavior data, user subscriber priority information, etc. Cognitive radio techniques can be used in remote stations or base stations, and generally differ from intelligent antenna systems (e.g., multiple input multiple output MIMO devices) which rely upon beamforming to avoid interference. For cognitive radios, accurate analysis of a spectral region is important to identify available bands.
Analyzing spectral regions is difficult in general; and this difficulty can vary depending on the type of wireless communication network involved. Wireless systems are often classified according to their modulation scheme, such as Time Division Multiple Access System (TDMA), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), etc. CDMA is a type of Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) modulation scheme where channels are defined by complementary, orthogonal or pseudo-random spreading sequences or codes, with each user assigned a unique spreading sequence that has a frequency much higher than that of the user's data signal. DSSS signals have spectral characteristics of bandwidth limited white noise in the RF spectrum. A typical DSSS signal is likely to have one or more interference signals present, e.g., multipath, co-channel, etc. The task of identifying interference in a DSSS signal represents a classic detection-of-signals-in-noise problem, where the “noise” that needs to be detected is in fact a signal in a spectrum whose characteristics are similar to white noise. In other words, the white noise is the signal that needs to be preserved, and the interference signal is undesired.
Cognitive radios typically employ modulations schemes such as Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which is popular for wideband digital communication and generally considered more robust than CDMA in avoiding co-channel interference. Proper analysis of the frequency spectrum is still difficult even in OFDMA-based system, because the conventional cognitive radios apply brute force algorithms to sense and manage a spectral range. For example, to save time, systems typically block out large portions of a spectral range if interference is detected there. The systems are based on avoidance algorithms. However, given the rapid growth in wireless communication systems, many of which overlap in coverage area, these avoidance algorithms “lose” too much available bandwidth to make cognitive radios practical in all situations.